The Song of Yarru, Chapter Five
Previous Chapters
Those of you who suspected that we might be in for a serious turn in the story after last chapter's lull were quite right.
...
The screams tore Rose out of her slumber with the force of a lightning bolt. The Doctor flung away the book he had been reading by the light of the sonic screwdriver and leapt to his feet. In the sudden darkness, she could see only his outline and the glint of firelight off his glasses.
"Come on," he urged.
His tendency to get redressed in the middle of the night did have a certain practical advantage, she thought. She fumbled for her discarded tunic, pulling it over her head as she followed him out the curtained door onto the platform. Outside, Yarruni were similarly emerging from their huts with groggy alarm, and everyone looked for the source of the continued shrieks of agony.
It was Anahit.
Arri stood next to her, trying to cover her naked form with a blanket and comfort her as she continued to scream. He kept looking from his wife to the onlookers, searching the faces for someone else, and Rose realized with a sickening jolt that Aiku was nowhere to be seen.
The Doctor bounded over in front of Anahit. "Stop it," he ordered. "Anahit. Stop it." Her wide-eyed terror did not diminish, but the authority in his voice at least seemed to startle her into silence. "That's good, that's good," he said, more soothingly. "All right. Tell me what happened."
Anahit shook her head in vehement denial and sucked in a shaky breath.
"Tell us what happened," Arri demanded. Now that Anahit had gone quiet, he looked more angry than frightened, and all of his emotion was directed at the Doctor. His fur bristled and his exposed teeth glistened in the remaining firelight. "Aiku is missing and I want an explanation!" The onlookers murmured in heated agreement.
The Doctor stood his ground. "I don't know what happened," he bit out. "I will help. You just have to -"
"I don't have to do anything! You showed up out of nowhere and my wife goes missing -"
"You're wasting time!"
Anahit put a halt to the escalating tension between the two men with a trembling hand to her husband's arm. "It wasn't them, Arri." Her voice ascended as panic returned and threatened to overwhelm her. "Someone took her. A man. I can hear the forest - she's not out there. Not anywhere." As she trembled, the blanket around her shoulders slipped and exposed her left breast, covered with the same fine fur as the rest of her. The playful, powerful Tree Singer was gone, and the woman who remained was terrified and helpless.
Rose moved between the Doctor and Arri, who were still glaring at one another despite Anahit's intercession, and adjusted the blanket back into place. Anahit's huge eyes met hers, imploring and desperate. Rose pulled the other woman into a hug and mimicked what the twins had done for her earlier: a soft kiss to Anahit's cheek, a few gentle touches on her hair. When she withdrew, holding Anahit's hand, the lone twin looked stronger for it.
"Let's go back to your hut," Rose said. "You can get dressed and tell us everything. We'll find Aiku. Okay?" She fixed a glare first on the Doctor, then on Arri. "Behave."
A few minutes later, the Doctor, Anahit, and Arri sat on cushions around the low table in the gathering room. Rose arranged a cushion behind Anahit and settled down so that she could rub the other woman's shoulders and stroke her hair.
"How do you know she's not in the forest?" Rose asked.
Anahit scrubbed at her eyes and leaned back into Rose. "The forest communicates constantly. The animals and the trees - even the little dancers - they all have a voice. We're trained to listen as well as sing." She reached for Arri's hand and then looked brokenly at her other, empty one. "The sounds change when there's someone new around. That's how we knew that you and the Doctor had arrived, to send Cirryon."
"And tonight?" Rose prompted. The Doctor watched intently, sitting cross-legged on a cushion with his chin in his hands and elbows on his knobby knees. Arri, next to Anahit, sat bolt upright, his fur fairly crackling with worry, and his hand tightly intertwined with his wife's.
"She went to relieve herself," Anahit continued. "I didn't hear anything until I went outside, but I - I wasn't listening." She looked guiltily at Arri, and Rose suspected what they had been doing in Aiku's absence. "We were worried when she didn't come back - I thought she might have become ill. I went outside and the forest fairly shrieked with it. A stranger who appeared, like you, out of nowhere, and then he was gone and Aiku was gone with him. That's all I know."
"You don't know that this stranger isn't with them," Arri said coldly.
Rose, still crouched behind Anahit, reached a hand over to him and touched his upper arm in the gesture she had seen so often from the Yarruni today. "Arri, I promise, we were not involved in any way. We will help you find Aiku." When he relaxed, if only fractionally, she looked over at the Doctor. "What do you think happened?"
"Transmat," the Doctor mused. "At least, that's where we'll start." He scrambled to his feet. "Come on, then."
…
The lavatory huts weren't one of the nicer locations in the tree city. The Doctor crouched near the women's hut and scanned with the sonic screwdriver for some time before he found anything.
"There you are, you beauty! Oh, that's nice. It's Foucault tunnelling," he explained to the three of them as well as the crowd of onlookers who had inevitably gathered. Anahit and Arri's faces were as blank as Rose was sure her own was, and he gave a little shrug and continued. "Particles on one end of the tunnel go from point A directly to point C. Well, sort of. Not really. They do arrive at point C, but they have to go through point B, not to mention points D, E, F, G, and so forth. They just do it instantaneously. The good news for us is that Foucault tunnelling, as the name implies, is heavily affected by the rotation of the planet where the tunnelling takes place."
"Can we find her?" Rose asked, trying to circumvent the inevitable exposition.
He adjusted his glasses on the bridge of his nose and squinted down at the sonic screwdriver. "Already did."
…
For the first time in her life, Aiku couldn't hear the forest. The sounds around her were foreign and frightening - too rhythmic to be natural, with a white noise behind them that didn't carry any pleasing lilt of stream or wind or leaves - and she didn't even have Anahit to lean on.
She had never been away from her twin before. They had spent all the important moments of their lives together: the unremembered floating together in their mother's womb, birth, first steps, first song and then first words, the challenging rigours of training to be Tree Singers.
Even their love was shared, with Arri paying court to both of them in the traditional manner with twins. When he had taken her maidenhead in their marriage bed, she was cradled in Anahit's arms, and she later held Anahit in the same way as he made love to her. She hoped - oh, she hoped - that they would bear and raise his children together as a result of their lovemaking tonight.
She tried to sit up, but the world around her pitched wildly, so she held onto whatever surface she was lying on and waited for the dizziness to pass. It did, but she found she still couldn't see more than fuzzy outlines despite repeated blinks to clear her vision.
"Be still," a voice commanded. It filtered down to her through a haze of strange noises and she realized her hearing was as affected as her sight was. She started to ask a question - who or where or why, she wasn't even sure - and felt the first genuine panic as she found her voice wouldn't respond.
A blurry figure loomed over her. "Don't try to talk," it instructed. "You're coming out of a very strong anaesthesia."
Anaesthesia was a foreign word, but she tried to concentrate on its lyrical quality as it bounced on the stranger's tongue. My voice? she wanted to ask. She put one hand over her throat in the hopes of indicating her question and tilted her head up toward where she assumed the other's face would be.
"Do you want some water?" the stranger said, either misunderstanding or ignoring her query.
She nodded, and hands materialized from the haze to help her sit up. A cup bumped into her hand and she took it gladly to her mouth. The water had a metallic aftertaste but she drank it anyway.
"Lie back," instructed the half-disembodied voice, with pressure from hands to compel her to do so. "You need rest."
She curled into a ball on her side and shut her eyes against the blurry world around her. In her head, she tried to summon the sounds of the forest to comfort her. In their place, she had only the melodious foreign word to roll in her mind over and over and over again: anaesthesia.
Where was Anahit?
…
Watson stared through the one-way glass as Egan gave some water to the still-drugged homo cantans. Bell and Moss waited silently on the other side of the table from Egan.
"What are you going to do with her?" he asked.
"We'll take the specimen back to base for further study," Sellick answered.
"How many do you intend to collect?" On the table, the woman - and she was unmistakably a woman, not a specimen - folded into herself and closed her eyes. Her lids were darkly furred and blended into her long lashes. Her tail hung limply, like a piece of rope, from the table.
"Just this one," Sellick replied. "We want minimal disruption to the ecosystem, of course. If we need more in the future, we will return."
The woman's clenched fist loosened and he watched her face slacken into unconsciousness. They had drugged her again, of course. Bell and Moss adjusted the woman onto her stomach, her head lolling just off the table.
Bell surveyed her head with a handheld scanner, and after a bit of unheard discussion with the other two, discarded the scanner for a flat wand. Moss parted her hair on the left side and Bell slid the wand along the exposed scalp, exposing a scarlet line. He traded the wand for a pair of long tweezers and grasped a flat black square from a tray before nudging it precisely into the incision. Egan scanned her head again and nodded before Bell sealed the wound up with the wand.
"What was that?" Watson asked, not meaning the surgical wand, which he understood well enough, but the device now embedded under the woman's scalp.
"A precaution," Sellick answered. "It's a harmless magnetic coil, designed to stimulate a particular part of the brain. In this case, the subject will lose the ability to sing but will be able to talk and otherwise function normally. The magnet can be enabled and disabled remotely, of course."
"Of course," Watson parroted, sick to his stomach. He knew now what they wanted with her. So much power from a song, building entire cities with their voices. Now, with that device in her scalp, they had put a safety switch on a weapon.
No wonder Sellick was here.
He couldn't stand back and let them do it, but what could he do about it? Transmatting her back to the surface would be futile. They'd simply capture her again or select another victim and he'd lose any ability to act in their defense. The only leverage he had was to expose what was happening.
He had a video recorder in his office.
…
Anahit tried not to look at the small hollow in the cushions that Aiku had occupied as she searched for some more practical clothes. The bedroom was a different place than it had been when she was last there - such a short time ago - when she had drowsed in Arri's arms and waited for her sister's return.
Rather than the tunic that she favoured, she pulled on some of Arri's leggings and a shirt that came just past her waist. She quickly lashed her hair back into a functional knot and listened to Arri voice his concerns.
"Why do you trust them? They're strangers. We don't know anything about them."
"I know enough," she said, conscious of the thin barrier between their room and the next, where Rose was changing into the clothes she had worn the previous day. She could hear the low murmur of voices. "Rose is a good person. She was worried about the little dancers, Arri - she thought we were going to pluck them, and she wanted to stop us."
"A flower -"
"Not just a flower. A life she cared about. And this Doctor? You didn't see him when we sang yesterday to grow the new platform. He had the same wonder in his eyes that the little ones who want to be Singers have. No, Arri. You are wrong to suspect them." She threaded her fingers through his and squeezed tightly. "Trust me. I know these things. I've listened to the forest from the first time they arrived." She closed her eyes and reached back into her mind. "When they appeared, the forest welcomed them. There was no fear, only curiosity. No danger. Tonight - when Aiku disappeared -"
"Anahit," he murmured, drawing her closer.
"It was like a fire. The whole forest cried out with the wrongness of it. We must trust them, Arri. They will help us get her back. How else can we find someone who has just disappeared?"
"By using someone else who can disappear," he said woodenly.
"By taking help freely given," Anahit corrected. She untangled her fingers from his and put both her palms against his cheeks. "I am going with them."
She felt a shock of guilt at the grief on his face, although she had been expecting it. "I could lose you both," he whispered, and his hands came up to rest gently on her hips. "Let me go."
"Then I could lose you both," she echoed. "There is risk no matter who goes, Arri. You are needed here. The people are frightened and need their leader."
"But you are their Singer -"
"Right now, I am a sister more than I am a Tree Singer. You must be a leader for Yarru." She stroked his face and ran one thumb along the whiskers on his right side, and smiled despite her own turmoil when he shivered in response. "I will go with the Doctor and Rose and disappear to find Aiku. It will keep me strong to know you are here, to know you are keeping Yarru safe and ready for us when we return."
"Anahit, please," he breathed, and after a moment's study of her face, kissed her. The sweetness of it overwhelmed her.
"I will bring her back for us," she told him, drawing back. He let her go, no matter how much his eyes told her that he wanted to hold her close and keep her with him. "My brave Arri."
"Come back to me," he said. "Both of you."
…
The Doctor jogged briskly through the crowd with Rose and Anahit close behind him. Rose had long since lost any sense of direction in the winding path through the trees, but the Doctor knew exactly where the TARDIS was and took the shortest route there.
"We don't have time for a long explanation," he told Anahit. He swivelled half around and tried to make eye contact as he ran, which rightly should have resulted in a twisted ankle or at least a collision with a tree, but he managed it well enough. "We're going to my ship. The TARDIS. We don't have time for the usual reaction and astonishment, so just accept what you see for the short term and I'll give you the grand tour at some later date."
"With Aiku," Rose added.
With that, they arrived at the TARDIS. The Doctor hurriedly unlocked the door and ran inside, leaving the two of them to follow after him.
As Anahit entered, the perpetual hum of the TARDIS shifted slightly, and her strained face relaxed in response. The Doctor, who was already working madly at the console, froze, and for the first time since the dreadful moment so long ago when the TARDIS had first tumbled into Pete's World, the console room went completely silent.
Anahit opened her mouth to lift her voice into that impossible sound that was an entire choir in itself. When the music shifted and became yet fuller, Rose felt tears sting her eyes; the TARDIS was humming again in harmony with the song.
When Anahit stopped, the TARDIS reverted to its normal steady rhythm. "She has a lovely voice, your ship," she told the Doctor.
He snapped his mouth shut and returned his attention to the console as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened. "Rose? The door, please?"
She secured them in and felt the jolt as they left normal space. Rose held on to one of the columns but Anahit stood braced simply with her own two legs. She had immediately found her "TARDIS legs," Rose supposed. Maybe it was the tail, the only part of her that moved, that gave her such perfect balance.
"There's a survey station in orbit around the planet," the Doctor said to the room at large. "That's where Aiku is. I've got us exactly opposite the planet from them right now so we should avoid detection. Not that they would have any idea what they were looking at even if they did see us."
"What's the plan?" Rose asked.
"Same operation as they used," he said from his position at the console. "Surgical strike. Get in, get out."
"What good does that do?"
Rose and the Doctor looked with a single stunned expression at Anahit, who had one hand on her hip and her tail flicking angrily behind her.
"I said, what good does that do?" she repeated. "Won't they just take her again? And what about everyone else?" No one answered and Anahit began to pace back and forth. "We need to fix this. Why did they take Aiku - these people from the sky? What do they want from us?"
"I can make a few educated guesses," the Doctor said. "Do you really want to know?"
She flinched only slightly. "Yes."
"There's a lot of scientific surveying of terrestrial planets going on during this time period. It's the same thing Thomas Wynter was doing. They're studying your planet to gain knowledge, or at least, I'm guessing that was the original plan."
"How does kidnapping Aiku help them gain knowledge?" Anahit asked. She sounded less angry, but Rose feared the loss of that anger. If she allowed herself to become intimidated, or fearful, this could turn very ugly.
"You have a gift they do not, Anahit. Your song. Under normal circumstances the survey team would have discreetly captured some readings, maybe some genetic samples, and left you in peace. However, there's a military transport docked with that survey station and we've got to assume for the moment that this is related to Aiku's abduction."
"Military?" she said. "What does the song have to do with war?"
Rose hated to see the look on the Doctor's face that she saw now. His eyes became dark hollows where all the sorrows and horrors of his long life resided, where there was no innocence, where there was fear and death and grief and rage. He didn't want to tell Anahit what he suspected, or what he knew, because he didn't want to put a heavy burden on her. Rose knew. He had spent enough time trying to protect her from the same darkness over the years.
She wanted to touch him and offer comfort, but he was so far away that she could have crushed herself against him and he still would have been alone. Later, when he returned to himself, she could help. For now, she had to watch as he suffered on his own.
"Your song stimulates biological matter," he said without emotion. "You can prompt a single cell to divide or to expand. You can cause a brain to release a flood of hormones or neurotransmitters. You can coax a tree into doubling its growth rate and control the direction of that growth. That means you can overwhelm it, too. You could make the tree grow so much it couldn't sustain that growth. The brain could release the wrong neurotransmitter and stop a heart. You could make internal organs rupture."
Anahit's face had gone white, even underneath her tan fur. "We would never harm with the song. It is the first rule we learn in training to be a Tree Singer."
"You never disobeyed?" he asked. "Or knew of someone who did?"
She swallowed and studied the grating under her feet before replying. "Once. Aiku and I were young - we had been in training for a year or so. There was a lizard." A darting, mournful smile flickered across her face. "A grown one. I sang to make him young again, when he was red and green and mottled, and then sang him old to watch the ridges form along his back. It made Aiku laugh." The smile, which had been ironic, faded completely. "I did it again, and again, until the colours faded from his skin and he stopped breathing. His skin was like ash to the touch, just blowing away in the breeze."
"The song stimulates biological action, but it doesn't provide sustenance," said the Doctor. "His metabolism couldn't maintain that level of activity."
"We confessed, and we were punished," Anahit continued. "I've never harmed another living thing. I don't know if I could hurt anything else."
"The military expedition that captured Aiku thinks that she could be used to do so, or more likely that they could study how your abilities work and how to transfer them to others."
Anahit closed her eyes against the new knowledge and a single tear beaded on her soft fur and wound down awkwardly toward her chin, followed by a second and a third. Rose thought she might hate the unknown villains on the survey station as much as she had hated anyone before, because they had taken a thing of such perfect, innocent beauty and turned it into a weapon.
"Tell me what we're going to do to stop them," Anahit said.
Chapter Six
Those of you who suspected that we might be in for a serious turn in the story after last chapter's lull were quite right.
...
The screams tore Rose out of her slumber with the force of a lightning bolt. The Doctor flung away the book he had been reading by the light of the sonic screwdriver and leapt to his feet. In the sudden darkness, she could see only his outline and the glint of firelight off his glasses.
"Come on," he urged.
His tendency to get redressed in the middle of the night did have a certain practical advantage, she thought. She fumbled for her discarded tunic, pulling it over her head as she followed him out the curtained door onto the platform. Outside, Yarruni were similarly emerging from their huts with groggy alarm, and everyone looked for the source of the continued shrieks of agony.
It was Anahit.
Arri stood next to her, trying to cover her naked form with a blanket and comfort her as she continued to scream. He kept looking from his wife to the onlookers, searching the faces for someone else, and Rose realized with a sickening jolt that Aiku was nowhere to be seen.
The Doctor bounded over in front of Anahit. "Stop it," he ordered. "Anahit. Stop it." Her wide-eyed terror did not diminish, but the authority in his voice at least seemed to startle her into silence. "That's good, that's good," he said, more soothingly. "All right. Tell me what happened."
Anahit shook her head in vehement denial and sucked in a shaky breath.
"Tell us what happened," Arri demanded. Now that Anahit had gone quiet, he looked more angry than frightened, and all of his emotion was directed at the Doctor. His fur bristled and his exposed teeth glistened in the remaining firelight. "Aiku is missing and I want an explanation!" The onlookers murmured in heated agreement.
The Doctor stood his ground. "I don't know what happened," he bit out. "I will help. You just have to -"
"I don't have to do anything! You showed up out of nowhere and my wife goes missing -"
"You're wasting time!"
Anahit put a halt to the escalating tension between the two men with a trembling hand to her husband's arm. "It wasn't them, Arri." Her voice ascended as panic returned and threatened to overwhelm her. "Someone took her. A man. I can hear the forest - she's not out there. Not anywhere." As she trembled, the blanket around her shoulders slipped and exposed her left breast, covered with the same fine fur as the rest of her. The playful, powerful Tree Singer was gone, and the woman who remained was terrified and helpless.
Rose moved between the Doctor and Arri, who were still glaring at one another despite Anahit's intercession, and adjusted the blanket back into place. Anahit's huge eyes met hers, imploring and desperate. Rose pulled the other woman into a hug and mimicked what the twins had done for her earlier: a soft kiss to Anahit's cheek, a few gentle touches on her hair. When she withdrew, holding Anahit's hand, the lone twin looked stronger for it.
"Let's go back to your hut," Rose said. "You can get dressed and tell us everything. We'll find Aiku. Okay?" She fixed a glare first on the Doctor, then on Arri. "Behave."
A few minutes later, the Doctor, Anahit, and Arri sat on cushions around the low table in the gathering room. Rose arranged a cushion behind Anahit and settled down so that she could rub the other woman's shoulders and stroke her hair.
"How do you know she's not in the forest?" Rose asked.
Anahit scrubbed at her eyes and leaned back into Rose. "The forest communicates constantly. The animals and the trees - even the little dancers - they all have a voice. We're trained to listen as well as sing." She reached for Arri's hand and then looked brokenly at her other, empty one. "The sounds change when there's someone new around. That's how we knew that you and the Doctor had arrived, to send Cirryon."
"And tonight?" Rose prompted. The Doctor watched intently, sitting cross-legged on a cushion with his chin in his hands and elbows on his knobby knees. Arri, next to Anahit, sat bolt upright, his fur fairly crackling with worry, and his hand tightly intertwined with his wife's.
"She went to relieve herself," Anahit continued. "I didn't hear anything until I went outside, but I - I wasn't listening." She looked guiltily at Arri, and Rose suspected what they had been doing in Aiku's absence. "We were worried when she didn't come back - I thought she might have become ill. I went outside and the forest fairly shrieked with it. A stranger who appeared, like you, out of nowhere, and then he was gone and Aiku was gone with him. That's all I know."
"You don't know that this stranger isn't with them," Arri said coldly.
Rose, still crouched behind Anahit, reached a hand over to him and touched his upper arm in the gesture she had seen so often from the Yarruni today. "Arri, I promise, we were not involved in any way. We will help you find Aiku." When he relaxed, if only fractionally, she looked over at the Doctor. "What do you think happened?"
"Transmat," the Doctor mused. "At least, that's where we'll start." He scrambled to his feet. "Come on, then."
…
The lavatory huts weren't one of the nicer locations in the tree city. The Doctor crouched near the women's hut and scanned with the sonic screwdriver for some time before he found anything.
"There you are, you beauty! Oh, that's nice. It's Foucault tunnelling," he explained to the three of them as well as the crowd of onlookers who had inevitably gathered. Anahit and Arri's faces were as blank as Rose was sure her own was, and he gave a little shrug and continued. "Particles on one end of the tunnel go from point A directly to point C. Well, sort of. Not really. They do arrive at point C, but they have to go through point B, not to mention points D, E, F, G, and so forth. They just do it instantaneously. The good news for us is that Foucault tunnelling, as the name implies, is heavily affected by the rotation of the planet where the tunnelling takes place."
"Can we find her?" Rose asked, trying to circumvent the inevitable exposition.
He adjusted his glasses on the bridge of his nose and squinted down at the sonic screwdriver. "Already did."
…
For the first time in her life, Aiku couldn't hear the forest. The sounds around her were foreign and frightening - too rhythmic to be natural, with a white noise behind them that didn't carry any pleasing lilt of stream or wind or leaves - and she didn't even have Anahit to lean on.
She had never been away from her twin before. They had spent all the important moments of their lives together: the unremembered floating together in their mother's womb, birth, first steps, first song and then first words, the challenging rigours of training to be Tree Singers.
Even their love was shared, with Arri paying court to both of them in the traditional manner with twins. When he had taken her maidenhead in their marriage bed, she was cradled in Anahit's arms, and she later held Anahit in the same way as he made love to her. She hoped - oh, she hoped - that they would bear and raise his children together as a result of their lovemaking tonight.
She tried to sit up, but the world around her pitched wildly, so she held onto whatever surface she was lying on and waited for the dizziness to pass. It did, but she found she still couldn't see more than fuzzy outlines despite repeated blinks to clear her vision.
"Be still," a voice commanded. It filtered down to her through a haze of strange noises and she realized her hearing was as affected as her sight was. She started to ask a question - who or where or why, she wasn't even sure - and felt the first genuine panic as she found her voice wouldn't respond.
A blurry figure loomed over her. "Don't try to talk," it instructed. "You're coming out of a very strong anaesthesia."
Anaesthesia was a foreign word, but she tried to concentrate on its lyrical quality as it bounced on the stranger's tongue. My voice? she wanted to ask. She put one hand over her throat in the hopes of indicating her question and tilted her head up toward where she assumed the other's face would be.
"Do you want some water?" the stranger said, either misunderstanding or ignoring her query.
She nodded, and hands materialized from the haze to help her sit up. A cup bumped into her hand and she took it gladly to her mouth. The water had a metallic aftertaste but she drank it anyway.
"Lie back," instructed the half-disembodied voice, with pressure from hands to compel her to do so. "You need rest."
She curled into a ball on her side and shut her eyes against the blurry world around her. In her head, she tried to summon the sounds of the forest to comfort her. In their place, she had only the melodious foreign word to roll in her mind over and over and over again: anaesthesia.
Where was Anahit?
…
Watson stared through the one-way glass as Egan gave some water to the still-drugged homo cantans. Bell and Moss waited silently on the other side of the table from Egan.
"What are you going to do with her?" he asked.
"We'll take the specimen back to base for further study," Sellick answered.
"How many do you intend to collect?" On the table, the woman - and she was unmistakably a woman, not a specimen - folded into herself and closed her eyes. Her lids were darkly furred and blended into her long lashes. Her tail hung limply, like a piece of rope, from the table.
"Just this one," Sellick replied. "We want minimal disruption to the ecosystem, of course. If we need more in the future, we will return."
The woman's clenched fist loosened and he watched her face slacken into unconsciousness. They had drugged her again, of course. Bell and Moss adjusted the woman onto her stomach, her head lolling just off the table.
Bell surveyed her head with a handheld scanner, and after a bit of unheard discussion with the other two, discarded the scanner for a flat wand. Moss parted her hair on the left side and Bell slid the wand along the exposed scalp, exposing a scarlet line. He traded the wand for a pair of long tweezers and grasped a flat black square from a tray before nudging it precisely into the incision. Egan scanned her head again and nodded before Bell sealed the wound up with the wand.
"What was that?" Watson asked, not meaning the surgical wand, which he understood well enough, but the device now embedded under the woman's scalp.
"A precaution," Sellick answered. "It's a harmless magnetic coil, designed to stimulate a particular part of the brain. In this case, the subject will lose the ability to sing but will be able to talk and otherwise function normally. The magnet can be enabled and disabled remotely, of course."
"Of course," Watson parroted, sick to his stomach. He knew now what they wanted with her. So much power from a song, building entire cities with their voices. Now, with that device in her scalp, they had put a safety switch on a weapon.
No wonder Sellick was here.
He couldn't stand back and let them do it, but what could he do about it? Transmatting her back to the surface would be futile. They'd simply capture her again or select another victim and he'd lose any ability to act in their defense. The only leverage he had was to expose what was happening.
He had a video recorder in his office.
…
Anahit tried not to look at the small hollow in the cushions that Aiku had occupied as she searched for some more practical clothes. The bedroom was a different place than it had been when she was last there - such a short time ago - when she had drowsed in Arri's arms and waited for her sister's return.
Rather than the tunic that she favoured, she pulled on some of Arri's leggings and a shirt that came just past her waist. She quickly lashed her hair back into a functional knot and listened to Arri voice his concerns.
"Why do you trust them? They're strangers. We don't know anything about them."
"I know enough," she said, conscious of the thin barrier between their room and the next, where Rose was changing into the clothes she had worn the previous day. She could hear the low murmur of voices. "Rose is a good person. She was worried about the little dancers, Arri - she thought we were going to pluck them, and she wanted to stop us."
"A flower -"
"Not just a flower. A life she cared about. And this Doctor? You didn't see him when we sang yesterday to grow the new platform. He had the same wonder in his eyes that the little ones who want to be Singers have. No, Arri. You are wrong to suspect them." She threaded her fingers through his and squeezed tightly. "Trust me. I know these things. I've listened to the forest from the first time they arrived." She closed her eyes and reached back into her mind. "When they appeared, the forest welcomed them. There was no fear, only curiosity. No danger. Tonight - when Aiku disappeared -"
"Anahit," he murmured, drawing her closer.
"It was like a fire. The whole forest cried out with the wrongness of it. We must trust them, Arri. They will help us get her back. How else can we find someone who has just disappeared?"
"By using someone else who can disappear," he said woodenly.
"By taking help freely given," Anahit corrected. She untangled her fingers from his and put both her palms against his cheeks. "I am going with them."
She felt a shock of guilt at the grief on his face, although she had been expecting it. "I could lose you both," he whispered, and his hands came up to rest gently on her hips. "Let me go."
"Then I could lose you both," she echoed. "There is risk no matter who goes, Arri. You are needed here. The people are frightened and need their leader."
"But you are their Singer -"
"Right now, I am a sister more than I am a Tree Singer. You must be a leader for Yarru." She stroked his face and ran one thumb along the whiskers on his right side, and smiled despite her own turmoil when he shivered in response. "I will go with the Doctor and Rose and disappear to find Aiku. It will keep me strong to know you are here, to know you are keeping Yarru safe and ready for us when we return."
"Anahit, please," he breathed, and after a moment's study of her face, kissed her. The sweetness of it overwhelmed her.
"I will bring her back for us," she told him, drawing back. He let her go, no matter how much his eyes told her that he wanted to hold her close and keep her with him. "My brave Arri."
"Come back to me," he said. "Both of you."
…
The Doctor jogged briskly through the crowd with Rose and Anahit close behind him. Rose had long since lost any sense of direction in the winding path through the trees, but the Doctor knew exactly where the TARDIS was and took the shortest route there.
"We don't have time for a long explanation," he told Anahit. He swivelled half around and tried to make eye contact as he ran, which rightly should have resulted in a twisted ankle or at least a collision with a tree, but he managed it well enough. "We're going to my ship. The TARDIS. We don't have time for the usual reaction and astonishment, so just accept what you see for the short term and I'll give you the grand tour at some later date."
"With Aiku," Rose added.
With that, they arrived at the TARDIS. The Doctor hurriedly unlocked the door and ran inside, leaving the two of them to follow after him.
As Anahit entered, the perpetual hum of the TARDIS shifted slightly, and her strained face relaxed in response. The Doctor, who was already working madly at the console, froze, and for the first time since the dreadful moment so long ago when the TARDIS had first tumbled into Pete's World, the console room went completely silent.
Anahit opened her mouth to lift her voice into that impossible sound that was an entire choir in itself. When the music shifted and became yet fuller, Rose felt tears sting her eyes; the TARDIS was humming again in harmony with the song.
When Anahit stopped, the TARDIS reverted to its normal steady rhythm. "She has a lovely voice, your ship," she told the Doctor.
He snapped his mouth shut and returned his attention to the console as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened. "Rose? The door, please?"
She secured them in and felt the jolt as they left normal space. Rose held on to one of the columns but Anahit stood braced simply with her own two legs. She had immediately found her "TARDIS legs," Rose supposed. Maybe it was the tail, the only part of her that moved, that gave her such perfect balance.
"There's a survey station in orbit around the planet," the Doctor said to the room at large. "That's where Aiku is. I've got us exactly opposite the planet from them right now so we should avoid detection. Not that they would have any idea what they were looking at even if they did see us."
"What's the plan?" Rose asked.
"Same operation as they used," he said from his position at the console. "Surgical strike. Get in, get out."
"What good does that do?"
Rose and the Doctor looked with a single stunned expression at Anahit, who had one hand on her hip and her tail flicking angrily behind her.
"I said, what good does that do?" she repeated. "Won't they just take her again? And what about everyone else?" No one answered and Anahit began to pace back and forth. "We need to fix this. Why did they take Aiku - these people from the sky? What do they want from us?"
"I can make a few educated guesses," the Doctor said. "Do you really want to know?"
She flinched only slightly. "Yes."
"There's a lot of scientific surveying of terrestrial planets going on during this time period. It's the same thing Thomas Wynter was doing. They're studying your planet to gain knowledge, or at least, I'm guessing that was the original plan."
"How does kidnapping Aiku help them gain knowledge?" Anahit asked. She sounded less angry, but Rose feared the loss of that anger. If she allowed herself to become intimidated, or fearful, this could turn very ugly.
"You have a gift they do not, Anahit. Your song. Under normal circumstances the survey team would have discreetly captured some readings, maybe some genetic samples, and left you in peace. However, there's a military transport docked with that survey station and we've got to assume for the moment that this is related to Aiku's abduction."
"Military?" she said. "What does the song have to do with war?"
Rose hated to see the look on the Doctor's face that she saw now. His eyes became dark hollows where all the sorrows and horrors of his long life resided, where there was no innocence, where there was fear and death and grief and rage. He didn't want to tell Anahit what he suspected, or what he knew, because he didn't want to put a heavy burden on her. Rose knew. He had spent enough time trying to protect her from the same darkness over the years.
She wanted to touch him and offer comfort, but he was so far away that she could have crushed herself against him and he still would have been alone. Later, when he returned to himself, she could help. For now, she had to watch as he suffered on his own.
"Your song stimulates biological matter," he said without emotion. "You can prompt a single cell to divide or to expand. You can cause a brain to release a flood of hormones or neurotransmitters. You can coax a tree into doubling its growth rate and control the direction of that growth. That means you can overwhelm it, too. You could make the tree grow so much it couldn't sustain that growth. The brain could release the wrong neurotransmitter and stop a heart. You could make internal organs rupture."
Anahit's face had gone white, even underneath her tan fur. "We would never harm with the song. It is the first rule we learn in training to be a Tree Singer."
"You never disobeyed?" he asked. "Or knew of someone who did?"
She swallowed and studied the grating under her feet before replying. "Once. Aiku and I were young - we had been in training for a year or so. There was a lizard." A darting, mournful smile flickered across her face. "A grown one. I sang to make him young again, when he was red and green and mottled, and then sang him old to watch the ridges form along his back. It made Aiku laugh." The smile, which had been ironic, faded completely. "I did it again, and again, until the colours faded from his skin and he stopped breathing. His skin was like ash to the touch, just blowing away in the breeze."
"The song stimulates biological action, but it doesn't provide sustenance," said the Doctor. "His metabolism couldn't maintain that level of activity."
"We confessed, and we were punished," Anahit continued. "I've never harmed another living thing. I don't know if I could hurt anything else."
"The military expedition that captured Aiku thinks that she could be used to do so, or more likely that they could study how your abilities work and how to transfer them to others."
Anahit closed her eyes against the new knowledge and a single tear beaded on her soft fur and wound down awkwardly toward her chin, followed by a second and a third. Rose thought she might hate the unknown villains on the survey station as much as she had hated anyone before, because they had taken a thing of such perfect, innocent beauty and turned it into a weapon.
"Tell me what we're going to do to stop them," Anahit said.
Chapter Six